Enhanced BSN-Care: Cryptanalysis of BSN-Care and proposal of improved authentication system

Recently, loT based healthcare systems have evolved as a tool to enhance the quality of life of people. This kind of system allows medical professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses, etc.) to verify continuously the health conditions of their patients. As the healthcare systems manage highly sensitive physiological information of patients such as blood pressure, body temperature, and pulse, they are extremely vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, it is a mandatory requirement to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of patients' information. In this aspect, there have been many proposals and works providing security mechanism. Among those works, one of the latest work about a secure authentication system for healthcare system is the one proposed by Gope and Hwang called BSN-Care. In Gope-Hwang scheme, the authors proposed a lightweight anonymous authentication protocol and claimed that their scheme was secure. Unfortunately, this paper finds that Gope-Hwang scheme still has security pitfalls and limitations. This paper describes and cryptanalyzes the Gope-Hwang scheme to illustrate their vulnerabilities and security limitations. Then, it proposes an enhanced lightweight anonymous authentication scheme that solves the discovered security flaws. Additionally, this work executes security and performance analysis to demonstrate how the proposed protocol is more appropriate for a safe healthcare systems.